Designing Educative Curriculum Materials to Promote Teacher Learning

Thoughts…

Materials that promote teacher learning while teaching the students are Educative Curriculum Materials. Technology comes to mind. However, I still see technology as having to be learned first and the teachers have to become comfortable with it before they use it in front of the students. Then there’s still always the possibility that it won’t work anyway, for one reason or another, and the teacher always has to have a backup plan.

The article went into how a teacher brings their perspectives to the material before they ever teach it. It is a complex interaction, especially when bringing the student into the equation, and given the fact that the teacher makes decisions in a constantly changing real-time dynamic effecting upwards of more than 20 students at a time.

The article touched upon nine design hueristics to help create and determine educative curriculum materials. If the features of the curriculum materials are based on these, the article suggests that teacher learning will take place. “Curriculum materials that incorporate all three components (i.e., instructional approaches, rationales for using the approaches and recommendations for their effective use) may promote teacher learning and help teachers overcome challenges that they face…” (7). I highly agree with this statement. I have found that the majority of teachers like to do things a certain way, yet if you give them a reason why doing something differently might work, they are much more receptive to trying it and seeing the outcome for themselves. Teachers also like concrete, practical materials/ideas they can try immediately, and like it better when others have tried it and discussed the pros and cons of using it in a classroom. This is the difficulty when government, state and local district authorities make decisions that sound good but are impossible or ineffective at best to carry out in a classroom environment. Take teaching the Holocaust to Kindergarten through eighth graders. How do you get a Kindergartener to understand this? Or how about whole language? Sounded good, but now we have a section of a generation that had to relearn how to read when it was discovered that they couldn’t decode new words without phonics. Effective, efficient and thoughtfully designed – words that should be taken into consideration, and appear to be the underlying idea behind the hueristics. Although created with science in mind, they do appear to be adaptable to a certain extent to other curricula.